The headline features of the next kernel include support for Intel's forthcoming 10nm Cannonlake CPUs, due later this year, and the 14nm Coffeelake that will precede it, tweaks to scale the EXT4 filesystem up to two billion entries if required and Xen enhancements that will enable the open source hypervisor to create machines with more than 32 virtual CPUs.

Torvalds himself rates AMD GPU header file changes and ongoing changes to Linux documentation as the most important changes on offer in this release candidate.

The Linux Lord had more interesting things to say in another post from ten days back that has only just begun to be noticed beyond list-watchers, perhaps because the topic - Re: [RFC][PATCH] exec: Use init rlimits for setuid exec – is hardly eye candy.

The post concerns user rights in Linux and considers how to make them more secure as the OS boots. After suggesting a few approaches, Torvalds explains his ideas as follows:

And yes, a large part of this may be that I no longer feel like I can trust "init" to do the sane thing. You all presumably know why.

In case you don't know, he's almost certainly referring to the pair of systemd bugs revealed in late June and early July.

Yup – that's systemd as in the code so hated by “veteran Unix sysadmins” that they forked Debian and created Devuan Linux to avoid having to use it. Those two bugs and Torvalds' likeley ire suggest they were on to something with that decision. ®